


l'acqua ch'io prendo gia mai non si corse

by earnshaws



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 03:33:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14464080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earnshaws/pseuds/earnshaws
Summary: Alice remembers more about being a niffin than she lets on.





	l'acqua ch'io prendo gia mai non si corse

ANTIGONE : For I am a strange new kind of inbetween aren’t I, not at home with the dead

nor with the living.

— Anne Carson, _Antigonick_

 

Alice remembers more about being a niffin than she lets on.

She dreams about it, sometimes. Most times. Her human brain, her human senses don’t have the capacity to fully reconstruct the feeling, but still she remembers...bits and pieces, of what it was like. Bright and terrible— like the moment of a martyr’s death on the pyre, when agony and ecstasy are so intermixed that you can’t tell what is pain and what is pleasure. When she changed it felt like the magic was burning her up, eating her alive; after, she still felt that she was burning, but rather as the fire, instead of the frail flesh consumed by it.

In her dreams, she is burning again. She is lightning, pure blue electricity crackling across the semblance of skin which is how her brain tries now to understand her form then— and that’s another thing, the purity. She was so clear, so clean; she didn’t understand how wet and messy and entangled human bodies were until she passed beyond hers. All soul. Trasumanar.

When her body burned up, it felt like dying. It was agony. It was the most painful thing she’d ever known, and the most wonderful. When she was free of it, that anchoring flesh, she felt as though she had been living her whole life blind and chained. What a frail, stupid, slow creature she had been! Everything was like clear, pure water; she had looked around, and felt none of the trivial, messy muddle that was the world of humans. She had turned, and smiled, and looked at Quentin, and felt nothing but delight at the terror in his eyes.

She feels...bad about that. About the things she’d done, and the things she’d thought, the things she’d conceived of doing. It wasn’t even that she didn’t understand morals anymore— it was that they didn’t matter. In the whole of the cosmos, in the infinite expanse of space-time, what did the thoughts and feelings and bodies of a few organisms in an out-of-the-way corner of the galaxy count for? Very little. If anything at all. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen that before— but then, there were so many things that she had never seen before, and which were plain as glorious day to her now.

And now that she does feel again, now that she’s back and mired in this ridiculous mud of emotion and morality, she _hates_ it. And she hates that she hates it— the logical knowledge that she has now, that humans are so unimaginably _small_ and nothing she can possibly do matters a whit, wars with the impertinent, visceral reactions she has to the smallest sentiment. Q looks at her and she wants to cry for what she did to him, when she knows that she could do so much worse without the universe being affected in the slightest. How do you live with that knowledge? How do you reconcile anything with it, without going utterly mad?

She resents it. She resents this body, these feelings. How could she not? How could she feel anything else? She wants out of it, beyond it, _above_ it. To be reduced to this, without even the small comfort of magic to return to her some tiny semblance of what she’s lost, is the worst kind of torture.

Would she go back? Right now? Even if it meant returning to that state of amorality? Even if it meant that she might hurt, might kill Q, or Eliot, or Margo or Julia or Dean Fogg, or a hundred other people? A thousand? She would...like to say no. For the sake of her humanity, pretended as it may be, she would like to say no. She would like to say that she’s been brought back whole, and she can live like this now.

Part of it is the lure of knowledge. Though she remembers more than she’ll say, it’s not everything— not even a tiny fragment of the information she knew she had when the universe was as an open book to her. Glimpses, inklings, fleeting impressions. Things she experienced directly. That’s all. It’s still more than any other human could possibly know— ideas she can’t even explain, because she knows that no one but her could comprehend them. How much more is there, that her fragile human brain doesn’t even know how to process, that she knew then? Everything. _Everything_. She would give up a frightening amount to know it again.

She tries to quench it, that wanting fire, in work. All theoretical, of course, but it’s still work. She spends almost all of her time in the library at Brakebills, sat in a corner behind a carrell with this or that old text flaking and cracking with age under her touch, and tries to reconcile what she reads with what she remembers. Tries to re-trace those glorious outlines that hover just beyond the edge of her consciousness, that come to her shrouded in light in her dreams— the shapes of the universe, bright lines of shining order in a black, formless void. Even if she can’t apprehend it all— even if she can’t understand all that she once did, with only her frail flesh as an aid— even if it’s gone— she has to try. Some is better than none.

While she works, another sort of theorizing takes hold in her brain. About the nature of what she was, then. Nothing she remembers is so clear as the all-consuming _want_ — want like a fire for its fuel, like an addict for her poison, like a serial killer for his next victim. The magic consumed her, and then she became a part of it, and by so doing inherited its hunger. It is a strange kind of gluttony, a clear and pure and terrible kind, so very different from the simple need which came back to her, newly-embodied, when Q brought her that plate of bacon.

He’s another thing altogether. She is...afraid, now, for him. Because of her— what she did to him, what she almost did, what she might do now. Human in semblance or not. He’d brought her that plate of bacon, and she’d swallowed it down like it was water and she was an Israelite in the desert, and he’d looked at her with something inexpressible in his eyes. Some strange mix of love and pity and desire and bone-deep grieving, because even then he knew that though he had brought her back in mind and in body, the soul of the Alice he had known was gone, and in its place was this...thing. This Antigone, risen from the dead.

But she had still been so animated by that residual want, and she was still so angry at him, and everything she had felt was so mixed-up and terrible and horrifically new. She had kissed him with a furious hunger, and he had let her, and she couldn’t see his thoughts anymore but she could still tell how scared he was, and how needful. She’d held him there against the headboard and fucked him breathless, twisted her hands in his hair and bruised his ribcage, kissed him until he was faint from lack of air and she could feel his heart pounding against her. Fast and thready, like a sparrow’s heart. When she let him breathe he’d made such desperate little noises, and for a moment as she looked down at him struggling for breath underneath her, some unidentifiable emotion welled up in her, and she nearly cried.

She couldn’t tell if she wanted to hurt him. Part of her wanted to pin him to the bed and tear his heart from his chest, both for what he’d done to her and because of the fact that it would be so _interesting_ , to watch him as he writhed and screamed. Pretty. And part of her would have suffered the transition from niffin to human a thousand times over again, just to make sure that no harm came to him.

At one point she had wrapped her hand around his throat, held him there while his hips jerked erratically against her, and felt the delicate thread of his pulse. She’d briefly wondered at it, the sheer fragility of him, before she was overcome by a wave of mingled disgust and fury. Such a small, worthless creature he was! Made wholly of this frail flesh, weak and limited and ignorant. And he had brought her down to that same level, at least in semblance. Made her deaf and dumb and blind. It didn’t matter what he had _thought_ he was doing— if he had thought he was saving her, helping her, whatever— it was an unimaginable cruelty.

She ought to kill him for that. She ought to make him suffer in the same way that she was— and if she could not make him so horrifically numb to the universe, then at least she could make him hurt, in all sorts of terrible and fascinating ways.

She had tightened her hand around his throat, her nails digging into the shallow beat of his pulse— and he had looked up at her then, his whole body shuddering beneath her, his mouth open— and in his eyes she saw such desperation, and such fear, and such love, terrified and infinite. He would let her kill him, if that’s what she wanted. He would let her do whatever she liked to him. Even if he had no say in the matter, he would acquiesce. He loved her to the point of madness. Stupid little human that he was.

And she had looked down at him, at the strange mix of want and terror and adoration in his eyes, and that part of her which would have given her body and her mind for him came rushing back. How could she? How _could_ she? She might have torn out his throat right then and there, and he wouldn’t have even tried to stop her. And he would be gone, and lost, because of her. Because of her anger, and her curiosity— he was just trying to _help_ her! Because he _loved_ her! For God’s sake!

She let go of him as he came down, tears in her eyes, and stroked his hair gently as his breathing slowed and his eyelids fluttered shut. Sweet, fragile, precious thing that he was. And to think: she might have killed him, then and there.

She didn’t bring it up, after. He didn’t either. And when magic was gone— as bereft, as torn-open as she felt, a small part of her (the human part, she thinks) felt so utterly relieved. Magic, said that small part, had made her into an abomination. Now that it was gone, she could...not heal, exactly. One doesn’t ever heal from something like this. But press the parts of herself which retained the monstrousness deep down and away, and try to be something that at least resembled a human again.

(In her dreams, she does kill Quentin. She holds him down and vivisects him, like she did so many other lesser creatures in that bright and terrible time. She hears him scream, feels him writhe, and in her there is nothing but pleasure. She is aflame again, as the fire rather than the frail flesh; she knows all the things she has lost. Her skin is made of lightning, and she lacks for nothing.)

(When she wakes, she checks her hands for blood.)

**Author's Note:**

> title is from dante's divine comedy, paradiso canto ii, and in english renders as "the sea i sail has never yet been passed" (trans. robert hollander). epigraph is from anne carson's "antigonick," an adaptation of sophocles' "antigone."


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